By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 27, 2008

His short story about an orange that rules the world (until it is picked, processed and put in his fruit basket) fits on a bookmark. Last week, Benjamin Rosenbaum gladly handed one out to a customer at Stacy's Coffee Parlor, the Falls Church hangout where he wove many of the yarns that appear in his debut collection, "The Ant King and Other Stories" (Small Beer Press), which has been 25 years in the making.

The Arlington native is in town to read from his collection at Stacy's (709 W. Broad St., 703-538-6266) on Friday at 7:30 p.m., roughly a quarter-century since he submitted his first story to the New Yorker at age 13. The story was called "Launching the Minyan," about a group of rabbis who are shot into space, and it asked some important theological questions, such as "Can it be Shabbat in space if the sun never sets?" It was rejected.

His work since has been defined by that same plausible-fabulist, magical-realism, science fiction vibe. Rosenbaum developed a reputation at Yorktown High School for being "the writer" but stopped writing altogether in his sophomore year of college. After that, he lived in Switzerland for a bit, learned Hebrew in Israel, worked 70-hour weeks with software start-ups in Silicon Valley, returned to the D.C. area, worked for a gaming outfit in Laurel, went back to Switzerland, and flopped back to Falls Church to work for the D.C. government and National Science Foundation.

And now, at 38, he's back in his wife's native Switzerland, works a 30-hour-per-week computer-programming job, watches his two children and writes. Here's an excerpt from our conversation, which was dominated by his hyper, verbose delivery (think a recording played at double speed) fueled by two cups of Stacy's chai.

When you were young, it seems like there wasn't just a drive to write; there was a drive to write and be published.

Yes, and I think "to be great," in fact. With some friends of mine, there's been an argument about greatness. A friend of mine says you have to alienate everyone and burn through life, very Bukowskian. . . . I'm more Flaubertian. Actually my life is rather tame. On purpose. I require routine.

So what stopped your writing in college?

By the time I went to senior year of high school and was famous among my friends for being this writer, it was almost unendurable to face the blank page because expectations were so high and my skill set was kind of spotty. I ended up having this miserable, excruciating case of writer's block that got worse and worse.

What got you started again?

I was 27 and had sort of stabilized. I had a career that worked. I was in this online start-up company doing online strategy gaming. I ended up writing a lot of the flavor text. . . . Funny bits of humorous things or whatever. And everybody started saying, "Why are you here? Why aren't you writing?" That was a weird bolt from the blue.

So you developed a methodology of submitting stories, a system of points for each rejection to motivate you to keep writing.

Yes, I made up this points system. So then I was really diligent. I would write every Friday. A lot of it was crap in the beginning, but I was sending them out regularly. I was pushing down a lot of doors and seeing what gave. I was reading sophisticated new-wave science fiction -- Sam Delaney, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ -- and postmodern literary fiction, like Milan Kundera, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon. Those are big influences. It's been a useful process to submit things and get them accepted for one thing or another, because it's clarified what works. The first story I sold was to Fantasy & Science Fiction. It was "The Ant King." The check came on my 30th birthday.

After 30-odd published stories, do you detect any fan base?

Yeah, but there's also a writing community. There's a lot of people that are fans of my work, and I'm a fan of their work. That's one of the unexpected benefits of being a writer. . . . If I could go back and tell my 18-year-old self, who was suffering from this romantic notion of the destiny of a writer -- this idea that you have something to say that is internal to you, something inborn, and it has to come out on the page, and any revision is a concession -- all that is really, I don't want to say it's crap, but it's not really the business of the work of art. Rather than that life, which I imagine is doomed and lonely, the writing life that I have is intensely communal.

Do you just have a rich imagination, or do you look for elements of reality to exaggerate or project into the future?

I think both. I was a very weird kid in elementary school, and I was very much sort of an outsider and really living in my imagination. That stays with me. Part of learning to write is realizing the ideas do not come when you sit down at the page and say, "Now I'm going to have an idea." They usually come in the shower or while driving, and what's important is to allow yourself to capture those and elaborate on them.

If you had to project your writing career into the future, toward "the destiny of a writer" you mentioned, and toward perhaps attaining greatness, where do you see it going beyond "The Ant King"?

In some ways, I feel like it's all gravy at this point. If the project was to start to satisfy this 15-year-old I hadn't given up on, I'm done. In another sense, I'm ambitious. If I'm going to spend all this effort, the game is being known in 200 years. I want this stuff to last forever. On the one hand, I'm fine. On the other hand, the sky's the limit.

Any earned wisdom you can share with other writers, especially since you've plotted the submission-and-rejection process so methodically?

There's a theory in the stock market about unemotional investing. You should devise a system which will distance you from your own emotional reactions. I think a lot of people do have emotional reactions to rejection. They get psyched out, and it's hard to understand it's so arbitrary and huge and random. Something one person rejects, another will love. It was very useful to have a system. When the story comes back, you already have the envelope to go to the next place.